The influence of perceptions of labour market conditions upon increased demand for postgraduate study.
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Date
2020
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Abstract
Globally, education systems have increasingly become human rights ‘sensitive’, as they cater
for all learners and stakeholders involved in ensuring and maintain equality and fairness for all
students and educators. Education remains an important part of the agenda for the government
and has unequivocally been part of the international community’s agenda. While, many
countries continue to democratise and embrace equality for all, education for all has become
steadily democratised, and the more people are getting educated, the more the pressure the
labour market exert in hiring the new graduates. While higher education enrolment rates
increase, the youth unemployment rates in South Africa continues to increase. As of 2020, the
graduate unemployment rates stand at 33.5% for those aged 15 to 24 years and 10.2% among
those aged 25 to 34 years. Currently, only over 30% of the youth in South Africa have jobs and
about half of them participate in the labour market. The aim of this study was to investigate the
influence of perceptions on labour market conditions upon the demand for postgraduate
enrolment. The quantitative data of this study was collected using the questionnaire research
instrument among 190 final year undergraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Westville Campus. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS® Statistics, which is a statistical
platform that allowed the researcher to perform descriptive statistics and regression analysis to
understand the correlations and gaps with the dataset. Overall, the results revealed that there is
no relationship between the perceptions of labour market conditions, specifically in terms of
employment and earnings, and the postgraduate enrolment. This suggest that there are other
driving forces that promote and inhibit students to pursue postgraduate studies or join the
labour market after finishing an undergraduate study. This study calls for more future research
to focus on the real-life experiences of students and high school learner to understand the social,
cultural and economic factors that promote and inhibit students from joining the labour market
rather than pursuing a postgraduate study after an undergraduate degree.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.